Researchers warn that a bug in AMD’s chips would allow attackers to root into some of the most privileged portions of a computer—and that it has persisted in the company’s processors for decades.
If you have kernel access you can already do almost everything so a vulnerability on top of that isn’t that bad since no one should have kernel access to your computer
It means it’s what we in the trade call “a nothingburger”. On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you’d have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)
Requires kernel-level access. Also AMD is “releasing mitigations,” so is it “unfixable?”
If you have kernel access you can already do almost everything so a vulnerability on top of that isn’t that bad since no one should have kernel access to your computer
You mean like Crowdstrike?
I think they meant it as “once infected may be impossible to disinfect.” But it sure doesn’t read that way at first glance.
Did they change it? Because now it says “Allows Deep, Virtually Unfixable Infections” and that seems to say exactly what you are.
Surely one could use the same exploit to restore the original boot code as the malware used to corrupt it
What does that mean to the rest of us?
It means it’s what we in the trade call “a nothingburger”. On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you’d have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)
So install a multiplayer game, it has kernel level anticheat that opens a bunch of security holes, game over.
Kernel level access is absolutely achievable in the real world.